Saturday, August 13, 2011

... You might want to check out Rrrants at "Laughing Horse at the Pear Tree", which might be a pub, although the website doesn't make it entirely clear. Anyway, it's on West Nicholson Street, and I think my friend Dave used to live there once, so go and ask him where it is.

Getting back to the point, I can't speak for most of the Rrrants crew, but my other friend Jammie Sammy, who's an awesome and funny singer, is among them, and it's well worth your while to go and check her out. You know I only give free plugs to people I really like, so this comes with a Zoomy guarantee of quality. I'd go myself, but I've got a job and a memory championship.

In other news, the Blogger stats tell me I've had 42 hits from the Bahamas today, and I'm wondering whether it's one enthusiastic reader or a suddenly-emerging community of Zoomy-fans that has sprung up over there. In any case, hello! I always love to see pageviews from new places.

Friday, August 12, 2011

My computer developed a thing where Internet Explorer and Firefox kept trying to open new windows, so I did a search on google and found that lots of people had had the same problem, but nobody had replied with anything beyond 'sounds like you've got a virus'. So I downloaded a new virus-killing thing and killed it. I'm a computer whiz.

Anyway, it's the weekend, and you really appreciate them when you're working nine to five during the week. Although actually, I've been starting at eight this past fortnight, because that way I get up and dressed and out of the house before my brother gets up, and we don't get under each other's feet in the mornings. Still, it's good for me - I might keep doing it when he's back in China, although I'll more likely go back to my old routine of waking up at twenty to nine and still getting to my desk (a 15-minute cycle away) at 9:00 on the dot.

Speaking of routines, I'm tentatively hopeful that if I can practice all the 30-minute disciplines again this weekend, like I did last weekend, I'll be better at the UK Championship than I was last year. That may sound like a modest goal, but we've still got four months to the world championship (more than that if they postpone it again), so I'm pacing myself carefully.

And remind me to talk about cartoon videos tomorrow. I want to mobilise some kind of Zoomy Army to find some for me.

Wednesday, August 10, 2011

There are three memory competitions in the next month and a half, that hopefully I'll be going to if I've got enough money.

The UK Championship happens on August 25 and 26 in London. I just tried to look up the schedule, but all it says on the website is that it "will follow the same timetable as last year", so obviously I've failed the first memory test. Still, there are important principles at stake here. There have been four previous UK Memory Championships, and I've won them all. Gunther won seven consecutive German Championships, back in the dark ages, so I'm already half-way to one-upping him! By the way, this is also an invitation to other UK memorisers to get off their backsides and try to beat me, please.

The German Championship, nowadays not quite as Gunther-dominated as it used to be, although he did finish a strong second last year, takes place on 16 and 17 September, in Heilbronn. I'm certainly hoping to improve on my miserable performance last year. And as always, Germany is the place to go if you want to compete against all the best (non-Chinese) memory folk in the world! It'll be a classic, they always are.

And the Swedish Championship, which I also failed to win last year (although apparently a Swedish news article has recently announced to the world that I'm the reigning champion - it was actually Simon Reinhard, for avoidance of doubt, and I've never claimed otherwise) will take place on 24 and 25 September, in Gothenburg. People will come from all over the world to watch us memorising, because once again it's part of a busy book fair, and possibly in a giant glass cube just like last year. It's the place to be seen!

So pack your bags, everyone, and do some memory globe-trotting! I guarantee fun and frolics!

Tuesday, August 09, 2011

Yesterday I saw myself in a mirror and thought I looked really quite good. This doesn't happen very often (because, let's face it, I'm no oil painting), and the fact that I was wearing an open-necked shirt like my dad always used to no doubt has something psychological to do with it, but my hair is at just the length where it's sort of flowing without looking stupid, and my beard is just the right thickness that I think makes me look cool, so I was quite impressed with myself for once.

And then shortly after that, I found a new Krypton Force video that I don't already own! It inspired me to update my authoritative blog on the subject, which thanks to some internet research now almost certainly lists every release of Force Five cartoons that made it onto the British market thanks to the good Krypton Force folks. By my count there are only four that I still need to find!

"Krypton Force" is one of the most popular searches that lead people to my blog, you know, so that post is extremely important. The only subjects that bring more people here are "Bumcivilian" and the perennial favourite "How to give yourself food poisoning". The latter worries me a little, quite frankly. Is it the same person every time, or is the world full of people who need a quick recipe for sickness and diarrhoea? Please tell me, next time you drop by.

Anyway, all this disjointed rambling isn't winning me any memory championships. Today is the first day for a couple of weeks when I haven't done any memory training, and it's my brother's fault. He's gone away for the next couple of days, so I've had to cook my own tea and completely fallen out of the habit of memorising things after eating. Changes to the routine can be fatal, you know. I did lots and lots of half-marathon training at the weekend, by the way. I'm almost feeling confident of putting in a passable performance at the UK Championship in a fortnight-and-a-bit. Just as long as I can get back to training tomorrow. I do need a live-in slavedriver of some kind, as I've always said.